Science Fiction: The Shape of Things to Come | Socialist Review Science Fiction: The Shape of Things to Come Issue section: Mark Bould Steven Spielberg's forthcoming adaptation of The War of the Worlds prompts Mark Bould to take a critical look at the work of HG Wells. No one would have believed, in the last years of the 20th century, that the new millennium would prove lucrative for the estate of HG Wells. But then, just as Wells's work was about to enter the public domain, the British copyright period was extended to 70 years after the author's death. And now, a decade later, Penguin are bringing back into print 14 of his novels, with critical introductions by authors like Brian Aldiss, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville and Marina Warner. However, with two films of The War of the Worlds to be released this summer, the real money will be made elsewhere. You will be lucky to see the low-budget British version in a cinema, but Spielberg's movie, starring Tom Cruise, looks set to stomp all over multiplexes for a couple of weeks before collapsing, like their last collaboration Minority Report, under the weight of its own banality.

Although it's fun to ponder how Spielberg might reduce a tale of interplanetary invasion to the problems of fathers and sons, a more interesting question is why, 60 years after his death, do we need Wells now? Darwin's bulldog HG Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866. Bankruptcy broke up his family, and at 13 Wells started out in a series of menial jobs. Largely self-taught, he gained entry into the Normal School of Science (now Imperial College) in 1884. He was enthused by the teaching of TH Huxley, the scientist whose vigorous endorsement of evolutionary theory earned him the nickname 'Darwin's bulldog', but bored by his other courses, and Wells flunked his final year. Plagued by ill health, he turned to popular journalism, writing speculative essays, reviews, humorous sketches and a biology textbook before making his reputation, in the mid-1890s, as the author of the short stories and scientific romances for which he remains best known. In 1903 he joined the Fabians and, discontented with their excessive gradualism, quit them after just a few years.

With Tono-Bungay (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1910), he became a leading British social novelist. A friend of Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Wells was no modernist, although there is an experimental quality to much of his fiction. In novels like Ann Veronica (1909), he eroded the border between 'fiction' and 'reality' by incorporating barely-veiled autobiographical material. Later works, like The Croquet Player (1936), are fables or political allegories. He wrote popular volumes on history and science, and became a familiar voice on BBC radio and a figure of world renown. He met with both Presidents Roosevelt, as well as Lenin and Stalin. Nazis burned his books and he was barred from Fascist Italy. He championed women's rights and internationalism and he even campaigned, in 1924, to save the whale. He also contributed to the Sankey Declaration on the Rights of Man which became part of the UN charter. But if Wells is remembered for anything today besides his much publicised philandering it is for his science fiction, for that astonishing creative decade around the turn of the 20th century.

In his early scientific romances Wells depicted the vast expanse of space and time, and our relative insignificance. Like Darwin, Marx and Freud, he punctured the illusion of bourgeois man's centrality. The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) recast humankind as one species among many, as a temporary condition found somewhere between ape-like ancestors and devolved descendants. The War of the Worlds (1898), originally serialised during Victoria's golden jubilee year, explicitly criticises the Tasmanian genocide while Martian invaders lay waste to the heart of the British Empire. These vivid early novels are rich in ambiguity. Moreau is a fabulously blasphemous gothic replay of the Garden of Eden and a Swiftian satire on modern man's self-image. The beast-men that Moreau creates demonstrate humanity's place in Darwin's universe. They embody the struggle between evolution and ethics. They are estranged versions of proletarian and colonial subjects. And Wells keeps all these possibilities in play, not permitting his novel to collapse into some monolithic allegory.

In 1926, when Hugo Gernsback launched the first pulp science fiction (sf) magazine, he called for 'the Jules Verne, HG Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story'. He quickly reprinted 14 stories and novels by Poe and Verne, but reprinted 26 by Wells. Consequently Wells has often been dubbed the 'father of science fiction'. However, in the US pulp tradition, Wells's offspring were rather poor pupils. Its first decade was dominated by small-town bigots (as scared of the future as they were of women, people of colour and the working class) and dreadful writing. In the second decade the generation of Robert Heinlein bootstrapped themselves into competent-enough prose but abandoned Wells's metaphorical and moral complexity. Instead they championed reactionary renegades and unfettered capitalist expansion. They fantasised about purity, mastery and unbounded energies. Mostly, their offspring still do. Wells's real children are to be found in Britain, in Olaf Stapledon and George Orwell, M John Harrison and Gwyneth Jones.

Curiously, Wells's own sf novels after The First Men in the Moon (1901) fall into the error which so debilitates the pulp tradition he 'fathered'. Too often, from Gernsback to the Roddenberry-Lucas-Spielberg complex, a spaceship is just a spaceship and a robot is just a robot. They are there because they are there, not because they mean anything. Similarly, when Wells turned his art to the task of changing the world, he forgot that it was also necessary to fantasise it. He fixated on utopia's plumbing rather than the vision utopia allows you to imagine. Blueprints became more important than hope. Utopia demands such a radical transformation of self and society that it is unimaginable and inexpressible. But in the later Wells, as in most subsequent sf, social transformation became merely about superficial things. As Wells grew older he became more insistent, but lost the imaginative urgency of his earlier work. Corporate elites Miraculously, the reputation of Wells's stories and novels has survived their many mediocre adaptations into other media. One measure of Wells as an imaginative writer is that, no matter how poor the reworkings, they nonetheless capture something essential of their times.

The film Things to Come (1936), based on Wells's 1933 The Shape of Things to Come, was released in the year Guernica was bombed. It imagines the terrors of aerial bombardment of civilian centres and a 'benevolent' technocratic state which shades into fascism, a fruity world of corporate elites and shopping malls. Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds radioplay terrorised an audience already anxious about European conflicts and invasion threats. The 1960 film of The Time Machine replaced Wells's melancholy with the lunk-headed machismo of pre-Vietnam US imperialism. Four years later The First Men in the Moon's laboured comedy evokes a nervousness about the passing of empires. The shrill religiosity of the 1953 film version of War of the Worlds signalled the turn to consolation in the face of a nuclear cold war evident in the 1950s US Protestant revival. Its reworking as Independence Day (1996) is a Nafta-era movie set much closer to Mexico than Canada, in which the president describes the aliens as migrant labourers.

In Wells's novel the Martians are killed by bacteria. In Independence Day Will Smith gets to 'kick ET's butt'. The gulf could not be wider. Some of the Wells adaptations - The Island of Lost Souls (1933), The Invisible Man (1933), The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936), La Merveilleuse Visite (1974) - are pretty good. But even the best of them cannot reproduce the supple imaginative vision or ambiguous metaphoric treatments of space, time, human, animal, alien and machine to be found in the early novels and short stories. And if Wells's later writing is as ossified as his utopian visions, he should not be criticised too harshly. Before Rosa Luxemburg, he sensed the coming choice between socialism and barbarism - 'a race', in his words, 'between education and catastrophe'. And although he lacked faith in the ability of ordinary people to make the right choice, he nonetheless proselytised tirelessly for it - or at least for the choices that might make that choice possible. The early Wells knew the importance and purposes of the fantastic. He knew how to make the world strange.

The Time Machine imagined the evolution of rival but interdependent post-human species. They resemble the bourgeoisie and proletariat, aesthetes and engineers. But the time traveller realises that to treat them as such would be a mistake. He recognises the danger of reading this future through his own limited perspective. He knows that an interpretation is not the truth. This radically destabilising perspective may not be the reason we're getting so much Wells right now, but it is why we need him - and not dressed up in computer generated imagery by Dreamworks SKG, but in our hands and in his own words. Mark Bould is a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of the West of England. A selection of HG Wells books are published by Penguin Classics. The War of the Worlds (director Steven Spielberg) will be released on 21 June. The National Film Theatre in London will have an HG Wells season during May. Share article The Shape of Things to Come The Shape of Things to Come Learn more about The Shape of Things to Come Image:Shape of things to come.jpg The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G.

Wells , published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2106. It is not a novel, but rather a fictional history book. Wells creates a framing device by claiming that the book is his edited version of notes written by an eminent diplomat, Dr Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2106, and wrote down what he could remember of it. The book is dominated by Wells's belief in a world state as the solution to mankind's problems. Wells successfully predicted the Second World War , although he envisaged it dragging on into the 1960s, being finally ended only by a devastating plague that almost destroys civilisation. Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship - 'The Dictatorship of the Air' (a term obviously modeled on 'The Dictatorship of the proletariat ') - arising from the controllers of the world's surviving transportation systems (the only people with global power). This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca , and eradicates all religion, setting the world on the route to a peaceful utopia .

When the dictatorship finds it necessary to kill political opponents, the condemned persons are given a chance to emulate the ancient philosophers Socrates and Seneca and take a poison tablet in a congenial environement of their choice. Eventually, after a century of re-shaping humanity, the dictatorhip is overthown in a completely bloodless coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourble retirement, and the world state "withers away" as was predicted by Marx (and failed to actually happen in the Soviet Union ). The last part of the book is a detailed description of the Utopian world which emerges, in some way reminiscent of Edward Bellamy 's Looking Backward . Contents 4 External links [ edit ] Prediction of the submarine-launched ballistic missile Wells' book can be credited with an accurate prediction of the submarine launched ballistic missile , which was to assume a crucial role in the Cold War period. Though the warheads of what he termed "air torpedoes" were envisaged as chemical rather than nuclear, Wells fully grasped - two decades ahead of the military planners - the strategic implications of combining submarines with weapons of mass destruction . The relevant passage (Ch.

4 of the Second Book) reads: "The raider submarines were specially designed as long-distance bases for gas warfare. They carried no guns nor ordinary fighting equipment. They had practically unlimited cruising range, and within them from five to nine aeroplanes were packed with a formidable supply of gas bombs. One of them carried thirty long-range air torpedoes with all the necessary directional apparatus.(...) The smallest of these raiders carried enough of such stuff to 'prepare' [euphemism in the original] about eight hundred square miles of territory. Completely successful, it could have turned the most of the London or New York of that time, after some clamour and running and writhing and choking, into a cityful of distorted corpses. These vessels made London vulnerable from Japan, Tokyo vulnerable from Dublin; they abolished the last corners of safety in the world." As well as predicting this application of submarines, Wells correctly predicted that these fearsome weapons would not be fully utilised and would be mainly used to create deterrence between the various powers holding them. There have been two film adaptations of the novel. Things to Come , a 1936 film with a screenplay by Wells himself.

[ edit ] Other adaptations Playstation 2 - First-person shooter " Cold Winter "’s story features "The Shape of Things to Come". Cutscenes explain, that the game’s super villain, that isn’t fundamentally bad, got inspired by the book to induce a nuclear winter by systematic nuclear strikes to reduce the world’s population down to a viable minimum and prevent its definitive destruction. Another supposed advantage: The survivours would be that awesome to the A-bomb, that they wouldn’t construct it again. Further, a book cover can be seen in one of the loading screens. The Shape of Things to Come, by H. G. Wells : INTRODUCTION The Shape of Things to Come, by H. G. Wells Introduction The Dream Book of Dr. Philip Raven The unexpected death of Dr. Philip Raven at Geneva in November 1930 was a very grave loss to the League of Nations Secretariat. Geneva lost a familiar figure — the long bent back, the halting gait, the head quizzically on one side — and the world lost a stimulatingly aggressive mind.

His incessant devoted work, his extraordinary mental vigour, were, as his obituary notices testified, appreciated very highly by a world-wide following of distinguished and capable admirers. The general public was suddenly made aware of him. It is rare that anyone outside the conventional areas of newspaper publicity produces so great a stir by dying; there were accounts of him in nearly every paper of importance from Oslo to New Zealand and from Buenos Aires to Japan — and the brief but admirable memoir by Sir Godfrey Cliffe gave the general reader a picture of an exceptionally simple, direct, devoted and energetic personality. There seems to have been only two extremely dissimilar photographs available for publication: an early one in which he looks like a blend of Shelley and Mr. Maxton, and a later one, a snapshot, in which he leans askew on his stick and talks to Lord Parmoor in the entrance hall of the Assembly. One of his lank hands is held out in a characteristic illustrative gesture. Incessantly laborious though he was, he could nevertheless find time to assist in, share and master all the broader problems that exercised his colleagues, and now they rushed forward with their gratitude.

One noticeable thing in that posthumous eruption of publicity was the frequent acknowledgments of his aid and advice. Men were eager to testify to his importance and resentful at the public ignorance of his work. Three memorial volumes of his more important papers, reports, memoranda and addresses were arranged for and are still in course of publication. Personally, although I was asked to do so in several quarters, and though I was known to have had the honour of his friendship, I made no contribution to that obituary chorus. My standing in the academic world did not justify my writing him a testimonial, but under normal circumstances that would not have deterred me from an attempt to sketch something of his odd personal ease and charm. I did not do so, however, because I found myself in a position of extraordinary embarrassment. His death was so unforeseen that we had embarked upon a very peculiar joint undertaking without making the slightest provision for that risk. It is only now after an interval of nearly three years, and after some very difficult discussions with his more intimate friends, that I have decided to publish the facts and the substance of this peculiar cooperation of ours. It concerns the matter of this present book.

All this time I have been holding back a manuscript, or rather a collection of papers and writings, entrusted to me. It is a collection about which, I think, a considerable amount of hesitation was, and perhaps is still, justifiable. It is, or at least it professes to be, a Short History of the World for about the next century and a half. (I can quite understand that the reader will rub his eyes at these words and suspect the printer of some sort of agraphia.) But that is exactly what this manuscript is. It is a Short History of the Future. It is a modern Sibylline book. Only now that the events of three years have more than justified everything stated in this anticipatory history have I had the courage to associate the reputation of my friend with the incredible claims of this work, and to find a publisher for it. Let me tell very briefly what I know of its origin and how it came into my hands. I made the acquaintance of Dr. Raven, or to be more precise, he made mine, in the closing year of the war. It was before he left Whitehall for Geneva.

He was always an eager amateur of ideas, and he had been attracted by some suggestions about money I had made in a scrappy little book of forecasts called What is Coming? published in 1916. In this I had thrown out the suggestion that the waste of resources in the war, combined with the accumulation of debts that had been going on, would certainly leave the world as a whole bankrupt, that is to say it would leave the creditor class in a position to strangle the world, and that the only method to clear up this world bankruptcy and begin again on a hopeful basis would be to scale down all debts impartially, by a reduction of the amount of gold in the pound sterling and proportionally in the dollar and all other currencies based on gold. It seemed to me then an obvious necessity. It was, I recognize now, a crude idea — evidently I had not even got away from the idea of intrinsically valuable money — but none of us in those days had had the educational benefit of the monetary and credit convulsions that followed the Peace of Versailles. We were without experience, it wasn’t popular to think about money, and at best we thought like precocious children.

Seventeen years later this idea of appreciating gold is accepted as an obvious suggestion by quite a number of people. Then it was received merely as the amateurish comment of an ignorant writer upon what was still regarded as the mysterious business of “monetary experts.” But it attracted the attention of Raven, who came along to talk over that and one or two other post-war possibilities I had started, and so he made my acquaintance. Raven was as free from intellectual pompousness as William James; as candidly receptive to candid thinking. He could talk about his subject to an artist or a journalist; he would have talked to an errand boy if he thought he would get a fresh slant in that way. “Obvious” was the word he brought with him. “The thing, my dear fellow” — he called me my dear fellow in the first five minutes — “is so obvious that everybody will be too clever to consider it for a moment. Until it is belated. It is impossible to persuade anybody responsible that there is going to be a tremendous financial and monetary mix-up after this war.

The victors will exact vindictive penalties and the losers of course will undertake to pay, but none of them realizes that money is going to do the most extraordinary things to them when they begin upon that. What they are going to do to each other is what occupies them, and what money is going to do to the whole lot of them is nobody’s affair.” I can still see him as he said that in his high-pitched remonstrating voice. I will confess that for perhaps our first half-hour, until I was accustomed to his flavour, I did not like him. He was too full, too sure, too rapid and altogether too vivid for my slower Anglo-Saxon make-up. I did not like the evident preparation of his talk, nor the fact that he assisted it by the most extraordinary gestures. He would not sit down; he limped about my room, peering at books and pictures while he talked in his cracked forced voice, and waving those long lean hands of his about almost as if he was swimming through his subject. I have compared him to Maxton plus Shelley, rather older, but at the first outset I was reminded of Svengali in Du Maurier’s once popular Trilby. A shaven Svengali.

I felt he was FOREIGN, and my instincts about foreigners are as insular as my principles are cosmopolitan. It always seemed to me a little irreconcilable that he was a Balliol scholar, and had been one of the brightest ornaments of our Foreign Office staff before he went to Geneva. At bottom I suppose much of our essential English shyness is an exaggerated wariness. We suspect the other fellow of our own moral subtleties. We restrain ourselves often to the point of insincerity. I am a rash man with a pen perhaps, but I am as circumspect and evasive as any other of my fellow countrymen when it comes to social intercourse. I found something almost indelicate in Raven’s direct attack upon my ideas. He wanted to talk about my ideas beyond question. But at least equally he wanted to talk about his own. I had more than a suspicion that he had, in fact, come to me in order to talk to himself and hear how it sounded — against me as a sounding-board. He called me then a Dealer in the Obvious, and he repeated that not very flattering phrase on various occasions when we met.

“You have,” he said, “defects that are almost gifts: a rapid but inexact memory for particulars, a quick grasp of proportions, and no patience with detail. You hurry on to wholes. How men of affairs must hate you — if and when they hear of you! They must think you an awful mug, you know — and yet you get there! Complications are their life. YOU try to get all these complications out of the way. You are a stripper, a damned impatient stripper. I would be a stripper too if I hadn’t the sort of job I have to do. But it is really extraordinarily refreshing to spend these occasional hours, stripping events in your company.” The reader must forgive my egotism in quoting these comments upon myself; they are necessary if my relations with Raven are to be made clear and if the spirit of this book is to be understood. I was, in fact, an outlet for a definite mental exuberance of his which it had hitherto distressed him to suppress. In my presence he could throw off Balliol and the Foreign Office — or, later on, the Secretariat — and let himself go. He could become the Eastern European Cosmopolitan he was by nature and descent.

I became, as it were, an imaginative boon companion for him, his disreputable friend, a sort of intelligent butt, his Watson. I got to like the relationship. I got used to his physical exoticism, his gestures. I sympathized more and more with his irritation and distress as the Conference at Versailles unfolded. My instinctive racial distrust faded before the glowing intensity of his intellectual curiosity. We found we supplemented each other. I had a ready unclouded imagination and he had knowledge. We would go on the speculative spree together. Among other gifted and original friends who, at all too rare intervals, honour me by coming along for a gossip, is Mr. J. W. Dunne, who years ago invented one of the earliest and most “different” of aeroplanes, and who has since done a very considerable amount of subtle thinking upon the relationship of time and space to consciousness. Dunne clings to the idea that in certain ways we may anticipate the future, and he has adduced a series of very remarkable observations indeed to support that in his well-known Experiment with Time.

That book was published in 1927, and I found it so attractive and stimulating that I wrote about it in one or two articles that were syndicated very extensively throughout the world. It was so excitingly fresh. And among others who saw my account of this Experiment with Time, and who got the book and read it and then wrote to me about it, was Raven. Usually his communications to me were the briefest of notes, saying he would be in London, telling me of a change of address, asking about my movements, and so forth; but this was quite a long letter. Experiences such as Dunne’s, he said, were no novelty to him. He could add a lot to what was told in the book, and indeed he could EXTEND the experience. The thing anticipated between sleeping and waking — Dunne’s experiments dealt chiefly with the premonitions in the dozing moment between wakefulness and oblivion — need not be just small affairs of tomorrow or next week; they could have a longer range. If, that is, you had the habit of long-range thinking.

But these were days when scepticism had to present a hard face to greedy superstition, and it was one’s public duty to refrain from rash statements about these flimsy intimations, difficult as they were to distinguish from fantasies — except in one’s own mind. One might sacrifice a lot of influence if one betrayed too lively an interest in this sort of thing. He wandered off into such sage generalizations and concluded abruptly. The letter had an effect of starting out to tell much more than he did. Then he turned up in London, dropped into my study unexpectedly and made a clean breast of it. “This Dunne business,” he began. “Well?” said I. Books and Films - The Shape of Things to Come by H.G. Wells infocobuild The Shape of Things to Come The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G. Wells, published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2106. In the book, a world state is established as the solution to humanity's problems.

As a frame story, Wells claims that the book is his edited version of notes written by an eminent diplomat, Dr Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2106 and wrote down what he could remember of it. It is split into five separate sections or "books": 1. Today And Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration Dawns - The history of the world up to 1933; 2. The Days After Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration - 1933-1960; 3. The World Renaissance: The Birth of the Modern State - 1960-1978; 4. The Modern State Militant - 1978-2059; and 5. The Modern State in Control of Life - 2059 to New Year's Day 2106. (from wikipedia.org ) Things to Come (1936 film) This is a British science fiction film based on the novel The Shape of Things to Come by H.G. Wells.

Produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies, the film stars Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke, Pearl Argyle and Margaretta Scott. Related Links Benson: Futurology and the ‘Shape of Things to Come’ | The Dickinson Press Benson: Futurology and the ‘Shape of Things to Come’ By William H. Benson on Jun 3, 2015 at 10:50 p.m. Fred and Wilma Flintstone lived in the past, George and Jane Jetson will live in the future, and Ralph and Alice Kramden live in the present. Although “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” were animated, the three fictional sitcoms, including “The Honeymooners,” follow similar storylines. The husbands work at jobs: Fred on a rock pile, George at Spacely’s Space Rockets and Ralph as a bus driver. Their wives — Wilma, Jane, and Alice — stay at home. The comedy occurred in the characters’ home, at their work or with their neighbors. Barney Rubble was Ed Norton in cartoon form.

The three sitcoms demonstrate how unchangeable human life is in the past, present or future. Whereas a historian measures social and political change over time, his counterpart, the futurist, imagines change by gathering facts from the past and then extrapolates them into the future. Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so that everything does not happen at once.” “Mad Max: Fury Road” is George Miller’s dystopian vision of a grim future. Everywhere, the land is red, dry, sandy or rocky. A handful of women flee from a terrible present in the hope that they will find a better future “in the green fields.” The ruler and his henchmen pursue the women with a fury. The movie is fast-paced. Everybody is in motion, riding in gigantic machines with enormous wheels, traveling forward or racing backwards, fleeing, being chased or pursuing. It is a series of over-the-top stunt-man sequences, and each outdoes the previous. The movie contains far more action than plot. Futurology includes at least five layers. First, it includes the ancient Jewish and Christian prophecies that scholars incorporate into a theology called eschatology.

Second, it involves the 17th-century idea of social progress. Third, it presents scientific studies of societies, such as economics and sociology. Fourth, it describes utopias, where societies are located on an island or in a remote mountain valley, where people live in peace. Fifth, it produces science fiction. One person who addressed all five layers was the British thinker and writer H.G. Wells. Considered the founder of futurology, Wells “wove the strands of earlier futurism into a single body of work, more than one hundred volumes in all, and published over a span of more than 50 years.” Known more for his science fiction novels, such as “The Time Machine,” and “The War of the Worlds,” he also wrote history in “The Outline of History,” and also biology in “The Science of Life.” In 1902, “the study of the future was born,” when H.G.

Wells published his book “Anticipations.” In the first chapters he described a series of futuristic gadgets he imagined, but then he put those aside to predict the collapse of capitalism and nation states during years of unrelenting war, and the rise of “the technically competent, of the scientists and engineers, who would learn from their errors and build a world state of peace and plenty.” He wrote those words before either world war. In 1933, he wrote “The Shape of Things to Come,” a fictional history textbook that a historian named Dr. Philip Raven wrote in the year 2016. In it, Raven describes a world war that began in January 1940, when Germany invaded Poland. Because no single nation claimed an absolute victory, the war dragged on for 10 years. Then, when all nations were exhausted and spent, a friendly dictatorship made a grasp for world control. So, Wells foresaw the approach of World War II, but he was wrong about the date. Nazi Germany did invade Poland, but on Sept. 1, 1939, four months before the day Wells had predicted.

In 1938, in his book “World Brain,” Wells described an international encyclopedia, “a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.” Of his world brain, Wells said, “This is no remote dream, no fantasy. It is a plain statement of a contemporary state of affairs.” Wells died in 1946, some 40 or more years before the advent of the World Wide Web. Futurists today point to an expansion of globalization, calling it “the dominant theme of modern life.” One author wrote that in this new century, “the human race has created a framework of capitalism, technology, trade, mass communications and individual rights.” If a nation rejects that framework, its leaders are made to feel isolated and its citizens impoverished. “The more overtly intolerant a society is, the poorer it will be. It is intolerance that causes poverty.” War, domination and conquest will interfere in men and women’s futures. But when peace breaks out, people will revert to the same actions that their ancestors have followed for generations. Husbands and wives will go to work to provide a life for themselves and their children.

Just like Fred and Wilma Flintstone, George and Jane Jetson, and Ralph and Alice Kramden. People need a roof over their heads, food to eat and clothing to wear. The wives will try to tame their husband’s cantankerous dispositions, and the husbands will try to ignore their wives’ comments. Those things will not change in the future. Benson is a historian from Sterling, Colo., who writes a bi-weekly column for The Press. The Shape of Things to Come the Ultimate Revolution by H G Wells - AbeBooks The Shape of Things to Come the Ultimate Revolution by H G Wells You Searched For: Results (1 - 30) of 38 1 ISBN 10: 0141441046 ISBN 13: 9780141441047 Used Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin Classics, 2005. Paperback. Book Condition: Used; Very Good. Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. Though second-hand, the book is still in very good shape.

Minimal signs of usage may include very minor creasing on the cover or on the spine. Bookseller Inventory # CHL1804510 Published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd Used Hardcover ISBN 10: 0141441046 ISBN 13: 9780141441047 New Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin Books Ltd, United Kingdom, 2006. Paperback. Book Condition: New. New. 196 x 130 mm. Language: English . Brand New Book. When Dr Philip Raven, an intellectual working for the League of Nations, dies in 1930 he leaves behind a powerful legacy an unpublished dream book . Inspired by visions he has experienced for many years, it appears to be a book written far into the future: a history of humanity from the date of his death up to 2105. The Shape of Things to Come provides this history of the future , an account that was in some ways remarkably prescient predicting climatic disaster and sweeping cultural changes, including a Second World War, the rise of chemical warfare, and political instabilities in the Middle East.

Bookseller Inventory # APG9780141441047 ISBN 10: 0141441046 ISBN 13: 9780141441047 New Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin Books Ltd, United Kingdom, 2006. Paperback. Book Condition: New. New. 196 x 130 mm. Language: English . Brand New Book. When Dr Philip Raven, an intellectual working for the League of Nations, dies in 1930 he leaves behind a powerful legacy - an unpublished dream book . Inspired by visions he has experienced for many years, it appears to be a book written far into the future: a history of humanity from the date of his death up to 2105. The Shape of Things to Come provides this history of the future , an account that was in some ways remarkably prescient - predicting climatic disaster and sweeping cultural changes, including a Second World War, the rise of chemical warfare, and political instabilities in the Middle East.

Bookseller Inventory # APG9780141441047 Published by Hutchinson & Co (1935) Used Hardcover Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Hutchinson & Co, 1935. Cloth. Book Condition: Good. No Jacket. Hutchinson & Co. 1935. No dustjacket. Red cloth covers, black stamped title to spine and front cover.Spine sunned and edges bumped. Inscription on free front end paper .Slight foxing to outer edges of pages. Pages a little yellowed but otherwise clean and tidy textblock. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Bookseller Inventory # 001844 Published by Hutchinson, London (1935) Used Hardcover John Clute, H. G. Wells, John Partington Published by Penguin Books Ltd ISBN 10: 0141441046 ISBN 13: 9780141441047 New Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin Books Ltd. Paperback. Book Condition: new.

BRAND NEW, The Shape of Things to Come: the Ultimate Revolution, John Clute, H. G. Wells, John Partington, When Dr Philip Raven, an intellectual working for the League of Nations, dies in 1930 he leaves behind a powerful legacy an unpublished dream book'. Inspired by visions he has experienced for many years, it appears to be a book written far into the future: a history of humanity from the date of his death up to 2105. The Shape of Things to Come provides this history of the future', an account that was in some ways remarkably prescient predicting climatic disaster and sweeping cultural changes, including a Second World War, the rise of chemical warfare, and political instabilities in the Middle East. Bookseller Inventory # B9780141441047 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin Classics, 2005. Paperback. Book Condition: New. Brand New Book. Shipping: Once your order has been confirmed and payment received, your order will then be processed. The book will be located by our staff, packaged and despatched to you as quickly as possible.

From time to time, items get mislaid en route. If your item fails to arrive, please contact us first. We will endeavour to trace the item for you and where necessary, replace or refund the item. Please do not leave negative feedback without contacting us first. All orders will be dispatched within two working days. If you have any quesions please contact us. Bookseller Inventory # V9780141441047 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Hutchinson & Co. January 1933, 1933. Hardcover. Book Condition: Acceptable - Used. No Jacket. no dust jacket, binding is splitting at hinge and first signature. pre-title page is coming detached. no other pages loose. good ready copy. covers shows wear and staining. Book condition is good or better unless otherwise noted. Paperbacks, especially mass market paperbacks, will have spine creasing and may have age toned pages and curled covers. Binding will be intact, no major splits unless otherwise noted. We do our best to describe each book accurately. Any discrepancy between what is described and what is pulled will be noted in an email.

If you would like a detailed description beyond what has been provided, please ask. Bookseller Inventory # 295102 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Hutchinson & Co: London, 1933. Hardcover. First edition (& 1st printing).. Octavo, pp. [i-vi] vii-ix [x-xii] 13-431 [432] + 12-page publisher's catalogue for ''Autumn of 1933'' inserted at rear, original blue cloth, front panel stamped in blind, spine panel stamped in gold. ''Utopian reconstruction after a colossal war.'' (Gerber, Utopian Fantasy (1973), p. 152). ''The last of Wells's major utopian fantasies is a documentary fiction that attempts to reconnect the utopian future with the present by means of an imaginary future history.'' (Anatomy of Wonder (1995) 2-140). Basis for the 1936 film, THINGS TO COME. A little spine lean, a solid VG copy.

Bookseller Inventory # 25370 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Hutchinson & Co, 1933. Hardcover. Book Condition: Good. 1st Edition. Good condition.Hutchinson & Co,1933.First UK edition.Blue hardback(stain marks on the front and back cover,large tear on the edge of the spine,small tears,nicks and dents on the edges of the cover and spine) in GC, no Dj cover.Clean pages but with ink marks,aged and tainted on the outer edges,foxing marks inside the first and last blank pages of the book,some marks,creases and nicks on the edges of the pages.The book is in GC for its age but with some shelf wear.444pp.A collectable first edition.Heavy book. Bookseller Inventory # 191 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Hutchinson & Co., 1935. Hardcover. Book Condition: Acceptable. Ex library book with the usual markings. Bumping, marks and some chipping to dust jacket now in a protective plastic cover. Grubby, anned and marked page edges. Cellotape to front pastedown.

Smudges to rear end page. Small marks, smudges and some creasing to a few pages. Hinges and binding intact. GRADED COMMENSURATE WITH AGE OF BOOK PLEASE BE AWARE THIS BOOK IS PRE 1965 AND THE GRADE WILL REFLECT ITS AGE Major signs of wear and tear. Very well read. Reading copy only. May not be for the collector or suitable as a present unless hard to find elsewhere SECURE DAILY POSTING FROM UK. 30 DAY GUARANTEE. Bookseller Inventory # mon0001973304 H.G. Wells - Biography and Works. Search Texts, Read Online. Discuss. H.G. Wells Biography of H.G. Wells H. G. Wells (1866-1946), English author, futurist, essayist, historian, socialist, and teacher wrote The War of the Worlds (1898); Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.—Ch. 1. The invasion of earth by aliens from Mars, tripods attacking with Heat Rays and Black Smoke and the evacuation of London while people were terrorised in the surrounding countryside became one of the first internationally read modern science fiction stories. Wells is often credited, along with Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) and Jules Verne (1828-1905) as being one of the fathers of science fiction. Forty years after its publication, on the night of Halloween 1938, Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on-air radio broadcast of the novel caused widespread panic in New York City. Wells' masterpiece spawned more invasion literature and inspired numerous movie adaptations and print sequels. The popular novel foreshadowed things to come for the human race: robotics, World Wars, warfare tactics including aerial bombing, use of tanks and chemical weapons, and nuclear power. Part prophet, part pessimist, Wells was a prolific author not just of science fiction but also fiction and non, utopian and dystopian short stories, travel sketches, histories, and socio-political commentary.

While his most popular works tend to show a bleak future for humanity, he was not without his sardonic wit and wry humour; Think of all the advantages of a cheap possession--cheap and nasty, if you will--compared with some valuable substitute. Suppose you need this or that. "Get a good one," advises Aunt Charlotte; "one that will last." You do--and it does last. It lasts like a family curse. .... Her mahogany was avuncular; her china remotely ancestral; her feather beds and her bedsteads!--they were haunted; the births, marriages, and deaths associated with the best one was the history of our race for three generations.--from "Thoughts on Cheapness and My Aunt Charlotte", Certain Personal Matters Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 in Bromley, Kent County, England, son of Sarah Neal, maid to the upper classes, and Joseph Wells, shopkeeper and professional cricket player. The Wells were quite poor and it was not the happiest of marriages; they would soon live apart though neither re-married. At an early age Herbert was an avid reader but it would be some years before his talents as a writer were realised.

He attended Thomas Morley's Academy for a few years before financial hardship forced him to leave and seek practical employment. His father had broken his leg and not being able to play cricket anymore or pay for Herbert's school, Herbert became an apprentice to a draper at the age of fourteen. The experience provided much fodder for his future works including Kipps (1905) wherein orphan and draper's apprentice Artie Kipps gains a large inheritance and quick education on the ways of upper-class society. The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll (1896) followed; Thus even in a shop assistant does the warmth of manhood assert itself....against the counsels of prudence and the restrictions of his means, to seek the wholesome delights of exertion and danger and pain.—Ch. 1. When Wells won a scholarship in 1883 to the Normal School of Science in London he realised another area of interest that would serve him well in his writing; he began studies in biology and Darwinism under Thomas Henry Huxley, Aldous Huxley 's grandfather.

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), another of Wells' many stories to inspire movie adaptations, deals with themes of eugenics, the ethics of scientific experimentation, Darwin's theories, and religion. Wells was not able to complete the requirements for his degree and lost his scholarship, so, faced with financial hardship he moved to Fitzroy Road in London to live with his Aunt and Uncle Wells. He tutored part-time and studied part-time at his uncle's school. His cousin Isabel Mary also lived with them and they were soon married, in 1891. It lasted only four years; Wells left her for one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (Jane) whom he married in 1895 and had two sons with: George Philip (1901-1985) and Frank Richard (b.1903). Wells had liaisons with a number of other women, who became models for his characters, while married to Jane: writer Amber Reeves gave birth to their daughter Anna Jane in 1909 and in 1914 author and feminist Rebecca West gave birth to their son Anthony West. "I didn't believe in marriage anyhow, I insisted.

The great thing was not marriage but love. I invoked Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley , Socialism."--from Experiment in Autobiography (1939). For quite some time Wells had been writing stories and in 1895 he had several published; Select Conversations with an Uncle was his first, followed by The Time Machine (1895) which would become a best-seller. Wells is credited as coining the term "time machine" and popularising the concept of time travel. The Wonderful Visit (1895) was followed by The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895). His collection of essays and stories, Certain Personal Matters (1896) was followed by The Invisible Man (1897); The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow....He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. —Ch. 1.

When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) was followed by Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), The First Men in the Moon (1901) and his first non-fiction best-seller about what the world would be like in the year 2000, Anticipations (1901). A year after its publication Wells joined the socialist Fabian Society and met playwright and co-founder of the New Statesman George Bernard Shaw . A Modern Utopia was published in 1905; Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.—Ch. 5. Wells continued his prodigious output of fiction and non-fiction essays and articles on politics, liberalism, democracy, and on society including Tono-Bungay (1909), Floor Games (1911), The Great State: Essays in Construction (1912), An Englishman Looks at the World (1914), The War That Will End War (1914), and Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916).

After he published Outline of History (1920) he followed it up with A Short History of the World (1922) "to meet the needs of the busy general reader....who wishes to refresh and repair his faded or fragmentary conceptions of the great adventure of mankind."--Preface. Wells collaborated with his son, zoologist and author George P. Wells and biologist Sir Julian Huxley (Aldous's brother) for The Science of Life (1930), the same year Wells met Rabindranath Tagore in Geneva, Switzerland. They discussed issues of modern civilisation, government and education, comparing them in the East and West. Wells was fast becoming a celebrity and he traveled extensively, meeting with world leaders and fellow authors. The Shape of Things to Come (1933) was followed by Wells' examination of fascist dictators in The Holy Terror (1939). The New World Order was published the same year, Mind at the End of Its Tether in 1945. It would be the last book published during his lifetime. H. G.

Wells died on 13 August 1946 at his home in Regent's Park, London. In a tribute to his friend of over 40 years, George Bernard Shaw wrote in the New Statesman--"he never behaved like a gentleman nor like a shop assistant, nor like a schoolmaster, nor like anyone on earth but himself. And what a charmer he was!" In the Preface to the 1941 edition of The War In The Air (first published in 1908, then again in 1921) Wells wrote: "Again I ask the reader to note the warnings I gave in that year, twenty years ago. Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: 'I told you so. You damned fools.' (The italics are mine.)" On 4 January, 1902, Wells gave a lecture at the Royal Institute in London, titled "The Discovery of the Future"; "It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening." Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2007. All Rights Reserved. The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission. Forum Discussions on H.G. Wells Recent Forum Posts on H.G. Wells

Question: Who wrote the book first published in 1933 “The Shape Things to Come”?
Answer: H.G. WELLS